Often, at least a portion of a food processing system includes the processing of a food product in a continuous process, while the food product is conveyed between two different locations on a conveyor system, for example, a belt conveyor, roller conveyor, wire mesh conveyor, chain conveyor, or the like. It is known in the art that food product may be cut or otherwise divided into smaller portions in such food processing systems. Also, fat, bone, or other unwanted portions may be trimmed from the food products. Prepared food products, such as baked goods, may be frosted, glazed, perforated, portioned, pre-sliced, or otherwise processed. The portioning and trimming of food products is typically accomplished using high-speed portioning machines. See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,621,806, to Bottemiller et al., which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.
Typically, food processing systems may use any of a variety of scanning techniques to identify and characterize food product. For example, a scanning system may be used to identify the location and orientation of a food product on a conveyor system, and may further provide information about the two-dimensional and/or three-dimensional shape of the food product. This information will typically be analyzed with the aid of a computer to determine, for example, how to most efficiently portion the food product into a desired size, weight, or shape according to other criteria. For example, if food product portions of a specific weight are desired, the information from the scanner may be employed to control the operation of a cutting device to cut the food product to achieve a desired portion size. If the food product width and/or height varies, the thickness of the slices may be varied to achieve a desired portion weight, for example, using an estimated density of the food product.
However, automated scanning systems may have difficulties in correctly identifying and characterizing food product when two or more items are abutting each other during the scan. For example, current scanning systems may interpret two (or more) abutting food items as a single item. Moreover, even if the system is able to predict or determine that two (or more) food items are present, current scanners are typically unable to identify a shared boundary between the abutting items.
For several reasons, there is a need to accurately identify and distinguish food product that are touching. For example, often the food product is scanned to determine and optimize further processing such as trimming, cutting, portioning, packaging, and the like. If meat product is incorrectly cut, for example, due to the failure to properly distinguish touching product, the result may be undersized portions, which may be unacceptable to consumers. Also, if the scanning data is used to identify particular features on a food product, for example, the keel on a breast of chicken, and the identified feature is used to plan or optimize further processing, the ability to distinguish touching product may be particularly important. Accurate statistics on the food product, for example, number of product, length, width, and size of the food product, as well as sorting of food product, requires accurately distinguishing touching food product.